A line of business data integration (“LOBI”) stack enables access to data contained in disparate line of business (“LOB”) systems through a common mechanism. A typical LOBI stack provides an abstract representation of LOB data and the operations that may be performed on the data. Such a stack also typically includes a mapping language, such as the extensible markup language (“XML”), for mapping LOB objects, their metadata, and their access methods into the abstract representation provided by the stack. A runtime object model is also typically provided by the LOBI stack that uses the mapping metadata to execute the LOB methods and to present returned LOB data to clients of the LOBI stack in a homogeneous fashion regardless of the back end LOB system the data originated from.
Some methods in LOB systems are bulk operations that can return several thousand or even potentially several million records. Returning this volume of data in a single response may not be feasible especially over ubiquitous transports like the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (“HTTP”). In order to address this issue, many LOB systems provide functionality for returning a large data set by returning smaller portions of the data set, referred to herein as batches, in multiple request/response exchanges. For instance, in one example, an application programming interface (“API”) is provided by a LOB system that can be invoked repeatedly by passing a page size and a page number to the API as parameters until no data is returned. Each LOB system may, however, utilize a different technique to batch large volumes of data. As a result, in order to interact with multiple LOB systems to retrieve batches of data, each consumer of LOB data, referred to herein as a client, must be programmed with custom LOB system specific code for each type of LOB system from which data is to be retrieved. Programming each client in this manner can be a complicated and expensive process.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.